"They'll really hustle," she said. "They'll work as many shifts as they can get, work as many songs as they can, and they get more money out of the men they dance for. I mean, I make decent money working just three days a week. I couldn't physically keep up the kind of pace those girls have. I can't imagine the kind of poverty they must have come from to make them so focused on getting cash."

Instead, if they decide a girl needs to be put in her place, they'll slash the soles of her feet lengthwise with razor blades. Another common punishment is to slash a girl in the crease under her buttocks where the scar won't show.

Satine was horrified when I told her of this form of punishment. "That's pretty fucking cruel," she said. "My feet ache all the time from dancing as it is, and I don't have any foot problems. Those girls must be in an incredible amount of pain.

"Damn. No wonder they're desperate to get out here and make their pile so they can quit this business," she said.

That is, of course, if they're ever actually able to quit. It's possible that the girls work so much harder than most because they're still under the control of mobsters from their homelands. Satine doesn't know if any of the girls she's worked with are slaves to organized crime, but she agrees it's a possibility.